Lionel Messi had scored one senior goal for Barcelona. Sachin Tendulkar had scored one Test century. Tiger Woods had played four tournaments on the PGA Tour and missed the cut in all of them. Ronnie O’Sullivan and Serena Williams had just won their first major titles. Simone Biles, though already richly garlanded at international level, was still waiting to compete in her first Olympics.
These were just the other child prodigies. What had you achieved by the age of 18? How many of your dreams and aspirations had been conceived, let alone realised? How much of the course of your life had been mapped out for you? At the age of 18, your correspondent had no idea what he wanted to do with his life and at the age of 39 arguably still doesn’t.
